Open Book by Philip Marchand: The odd history of a 1960s Catholic psychoanalytic commune

In the long ago days when I was an undergraduate at St. Michael’s College at the University of Toronto, I heard rumours of priests and nuns, studying theology, who had decamped to a place called “Admiral Road,” where a personage named “Mrs. Smith” performed mysterious rites of psychoanalysis. As time went on, more and more of these Catholic religious personnel — the best and brightest of their orders — defected to Mrs. Smith.

“The religious, who had experienced the influence of men and women of great knowledge, wisdom, high responsibility, status and power, deemed her to be the wisest, most numinous and charismatic person they had ever met,” writes Grant Goodbrand in his readable and authoritative history, Therafields: The Rise and Fall of Lea Hindley-Smith’s Psychoanalytic Commune (ECW). Lea and the Catholics, Goodbrand comments, “fell in love with each other.” Vatican Three, a friend of mine called the founding of Therafields.
In my last year as an undergraduate, beset with unhappiness, I joined Therafields, signing up for what turned out to be a 10-year tour of duty in the war against neurosis, under the generalship of Lea Hindley-Smith. Naturally, the book is of great interest to me. But the book should be of interest to any student of Toronto’s cultural history, as well as any student of the 20th century’s grand experiment with the talking cure, invented by Freud and subsequently modified by innumerable disciples, rivals, renegades and heretics.

Of these offshoots of Freud, Therafields was certainly one of the wilder. Goodbrand, not himself a priest or Catholic — he calls himself “a convinced atheist” — was one of the original band of largely Catholic recruits and a member of Hypno 1, the founding group of Hindley-Smith-trained therapists. (The name derives from the frequent use of hypnosis by members.)

He was always a member of the inner circle of Therafields, which he defines as “a year-round therapeutic community, at its height involving about 900 members, 500 of whom lived on its properties. It was arguably the largest secular ’60s commune in North America and owned 35 houses in the Annex area of downtown Toronto, as well as four farms with houses and barns, totalling 400 acres, in the area of Mono Mills north of Toronto. In addition, there were two houses near Tampa, Fla., used by Therafields’ members for holidays and also for group therapy.”

Goodbrand begins his history with Hindley-Smith’s childhood in Wales. “The most traumatic and formative event in the life of Lea Hindley-Smith was the breakdown into madness of her father in 1920, when she was eight years old, which resulted in his incarceration in a Welsh asylum for the rest of his life,” Goodbrand writes. Certainly Lea, in her mature years, never had much luck with men. Her husband, Harry Hindley-Smith, the father of her three children, lost his job as a warehouse manager for a textile importer in London during the war, and when the family immigrated to Canada in 1948 Lea became the breadwinner, much to his lifelong chagrin. Lea prospered buying and selling real estate in Toronto, with a sideline in clairvoyant card reading, for which she had a decided flair. “What impressed most people on first meeting Lea was her uncanny ability to know what they were thinking and feeling,” Goodbrand writes.

From clairvoyant card reading to psychoanalysis may not be such a grand leap. What actual training Lea received in psychoanalysis remains sketchy — she had no formal credentials — but she was obviously well read in the literature. According to Goodbrand, she favoured the Melanie Klein school of analysis, founded by one of Freud’s more influential successors, but her greatest resource was always her formidable personality. Her intuitions, not her mastery of technique, drove her work, beginning with a handful of clients in the mid-’50s and then eventually the more than 50 Catholic nuns and priests and monks who spent time in Therafields. Those intuitions, as Goodbrand suggests, could be very impressive, but they left her with no intellectual defences against the seductions of quackery. At various times, Lea promoted the “orgone energy” theories of Wilhelm Reich, the primal-scream therapy of Arthur Janov and a form of spiritualism embraced by some of her therapists.

It was the enthusiasm of the Catholic religious, beginning with their experiment in communal living at a house Lea purchased at 55 Admiral Rd. in 1966 that really prompted the growth of Therafields. By 1966, in fact, Lea was already showing signs of illness — she suffered from diabetes — and overwork. According to Goodbrand, when she took time off to receive treatment for diabetes at a clinic at Duke University, some of the Hypno 1 therapists resented her abandonment of them.

Goodbrand constructs a narrative at this point that forms the major theme of his book. Hypno 1 members, the elite therapists if you will, began increasingly to resist Lea’s vision, influenced by the counterculture, of a genuinely alternative community, informed by psychotherapy and dedicated to the release of human passions.

In service to this vision, Therafields purchased its rural farms. Hypno 1, however, wanted to continue concentrating on individual therapy. In Goodbrand’s narrative, they were the older, more conservative generation, still influenced by their experience in the Church, whereas the younger generation, entering Therafields in the late ’60s and early ’70s, were more secular, adventurous, communitarian in spirit. Lea backed them rather than the hierarchy of Hypno 1. “With the rise of the youth counterculture, she now had a constituency who shared her values,” Goodbrand writes.

I am very doubtful of this. There was little of the youth counterculture about Lea, who loved the bestselling novels of Catherine Cookson with their plucky heroines, who was never averse to luxury, and who had no use — to her credit — for the sex and drugs and rock ’n’ roll ethos of the counterculture. She was a respectable woman, a kind of Madame Blavatsky, inveigling high-powered men, in particular, into spiritual but not revolutionary adventures. For that matter, it is hard to see that the counterculture attitudes of the younger generation in Therafields amounted to much more than eating organic food and practising arts and crafts.

Goodbrand also brushes aside the question of whether Therafields was a “cult.” He seems to feel that the word “cult” is simply a label devised by the media to make people nervous about dissident groups. I can attest, though, that however much the rift grew behind the scenes between Lea and Hypno 1, to the rank and file she was still presented as “the wisest, most numinous and charismatic person” anyone had ever met, to differ with whom was to risk humiliation. This was certainly a cultish state of affairs, particularly in the case of female members of Therafields. Goodbrand quotes a female therapist: “I think there was something very disturbed in Lea. It was a savage envy of younger women. It took the form of discouraging them from becoming child-bearing.”

Therafields’ financial woes and a change in the cultural climate of the late ’70s — nascent globalization, cutbacks in social spending, a new emphasis on entrepreneurship — weakened the organization and its dreams of alternative communities. Lea’s physical and mental decline hastened its end.

Goodbrand, who had been among those Hypno 1 therapists most critical of the leadership of Lea and her son Rob, president of Therafields, now seems repentant for his opposition to Lea. The book is a chastened tribute to the memory of this vibrant but flawed woman, redeemed of her errors by her great suffering. Her last years were indeed terrible. Her eldest son, Malcolm, was convicted of sexual offences involving girls at a school he ran, a school that began under the aegis of Therafields. Her lover, an alcoholic, committed suicide. Her wits were often scattered.

Near the end of the book Goodbrand relates a moving incident that took place not long before her death in 1987. She was nearly blind from diabetes, desperately ill, barely able to walk. She had lost everything — everything except the spark that had once enchanted scholars and priests. “She still had her audience,” a caregiver told Goodbrand. “Whenever we would go anywhere, like into a store to buy clothes, within a few minutes everybody in the store, the employees and the customers, would have gathered around her, listening, wanting to hear what she would say.”

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